“And she gave birth to her firstborn son and wrapped him in swaddling cloths and laid him in a manger, because there was no place for them in the inn.” Luke 2:7
My mom has always loved the Christmas song, “Mary Did You Know?” She always reminds us that it is one of her favorite songs whenever it comes on around that time of year. I never really listened to the words until recently, and right now I am thinking of these lines in particular: “Did you know that your baby boy has walked where angels trod, and that when you kiss your little baby you kissed the face of God?” What a powerful, yet incomprehensible statement about the God-man paradox that we know as Jesus Christ, our lord and savior.
Though we cannot even come close to understanding this mystery in its fullness at the present time, the church should dwell on it regularly. If Christ is the "exact imprint" of God’s nature, as the book of Colossians and various other books state, we must go to the incarnation and make it the lens through which we read the Word of God. If we do not make Christ our lens, we will perceive God in a dangerously incorrect way.
The incarnation is what makes Christianity different from other religions. Other significant world religions describe an all-powerful god who created and rules over all things. These gods are righteous, provide laws by which one should live, serve as judge, and demand to be worshipped. They are understood by their greatness and people try to fathom their power by dwelling on the way that the universe is upheld by the command of their will and how they are described in sacred texts. All of these things are also completely true of the One who I believe is the one true God. He is unfathomably great and his ways are unsearchable, but He reorients what we think about true power.
“For the word of the cross is folly to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God.” 1 Corinthians 1:18
When people think of power we usually think “the bigger the better.” We think of royalty, great kings and queens with unspeakable wealth, and armies that could conquer the world. We think of weapons that could demolish whole cities at once, and strong and intelligent leaders with unmatchable force. None of these things even compare to the greatness of our God. And it’s true, He does sit on a throne and “the train of His robe” does indeed “fill the temple” as Isaiah says. He does uphold the universe by the Word of His mouth and it is incredible. But that is not how He demonstrates the pinnacle of His power to us. Man cannot relate to a God like that, so He became a man and entered the world for us as a baby. A baby. What is this, that the God of the universe would come to earth in such humility and be born as a baby? There are no words to accurately describe the love that this is. God wanted to relate to us on the most personal of all levels, so he became fleshly for us. As He grew up, He would be homeless, live a life of simplicity and self-denial, serve others, wash the feet of His disciples, and eventually die for us. God, yes, the God of the universe, died for us.
"As far as power is concerned, to rule the whole world with a scepter is nothing compared to ruling it with a reed - that is, by impotence - that is, divinely." - Søren Kierkegaard
These words of Kierkegaard epitomize my point. We think it is power to rule the world mightily and forcefully, but God says the most powerful thing that He could do for us is come here as a human and die for us. Dying, to us, seems like the weakest thing one could do, but God says that it is the most powerful thing that He could ever do for us, and He did it.
Martin Luther has an incredible commentary on how the incarnation and cross are truly the power of God. He says this: “I often delight myself with that similitude in Job, of an angle-hook and little worm; then comes the fish and snatches at the worm, and gets therewith the hook in his jaws, and the fisher pulls him out of the water. Even so has our Lord God dealt with the devil; God has cast into the world his only Son, as the angle, and upon the hook has put Christ’s humanity, as the worm; then comes the devil and snaps at the (man) Christ, and devours him, and therewith he bites the iron hook, that is, the godhead of Christ, which chokes him, and all his power thereby is thrown to the ground. This is called sapientia divina, divine wisdom.”
With the world being under the power of the devil and enslaved to sin, Christ offered himself to save us. He entered the world as a baby, and as he grew up into humble service and a life of simplicity, it came time for his death. As he sweat blood in the garden, suffered tremendously, was whipped, flogged, stripped, mocked, spat on, considered a blasphemer, condemned to death, and finally breathed his last on the cross, I imagine the devil howled with satisfaction and blood thirst in his eyes. But what he was really doing was destroying the king of death and his works by death itself (Hebrews 2:14). Christ chose to partake in the things of this world and identify with us in every way — not to leave us alone in our suffering and sin, but to come suffer with us and to become sin for us. When Christ rose gloriously from the dead three days later, he made a mockery of the devil and his power (Colossians 2:15), proving it laughable that he thought that the humanity of Christ and His death on our behalf made him anything less than the most powerful in all the universe. It certainly does not make him weak, but it makes Him the greatest of all.
Our God did not want to leave us in our sin, bondage to the devil, or our misery. He wanted to come here, identify with us in every way, including the deepest of all sufferings, and then save us from our sin. That is, in fact, exactly what He did too. What an unbelievable truth that is, and what an unbelievably great God we have. Who else could destroy death with death itself? And now, because of His work and our baptism into His death and resurrection, we no longer are enslaved to sin and death. We were buried in the grave with Him, but when we rose into new life with Him, our sins remained there in the tomb — never to be spoken of again, and the devil who scoffed at his humanity and death was now crushed, defeated, and humiliated. That, my brothers and sisters, is the wisdom of God.
